I looked back thirty seconds later. So, sue a girl. He was too hard to resist.
He came down off the ladder and turned and caught me staring. His mouth curved into a wicked grin that had me immediately wet. I might not be experienced, but my body knew exactly what to do when confronted with a man like Colt. I picked up my inventory clipboard with the casual confidence of someone who had definitely been looking at the clipboard the whole time. Not at his broad back.
“You can ask,” he said.
“I wasn’t—”
“Charlie.”
I set down the clipboard. “The tattoo. Ranger insignia?”
He looked down at his shoulder like he’d half-forgotten it was there. “Yeah.”
“And the scars. From the military?”
“Mostly. Some from the trees.”
I nodded. He had a dangerous job. “How long were you in?”
“Almost ten years.” He picked up his coffee, leaned against the bar. Not closing down, not deflecting. Just — answering. Like he’d decided I was someone he could answer. “Three deployments. Last one was the worst.”
“The scar on your ribs.”
“Kandahar.” He said it flat, the way people say the names of places that cost them something. “Surgery for six hours. I was told afterward it was close.”
“Were you scared?”
A pause. Something moved through his face — not pain exactly. More like the memory of an absence that he couldn’t fill. “No. That’s the part I couldn’t explain to the therapist afterward. I wasn’t scared. I was calculating. Who needed to know what, what needed to happen next.” He looked at me steadily. “They trained the scared out of me a long time before that.”
I held his gaze. “Did it come back?”
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he wasn’t going to answer. He gave me a significant look. “Parts of it. The parts that matter.”
I thought about that, knowing he wasn’t talking about the military anymore. Was he talking about me? Did I scare him? And how did I scare him?
He went back up the ladder.
Just like that. Done. He’d opened a door, let me look inside, and closed it again — not harshly, just cleanly. Like that was all he had available right now and he knew it.
He worked through the afternoon while I did all the things I never had time to do during the week. We moved around each other in a comfortable rhythm that had developed faster than it had any right to. At some point I made sandwiches and we sat at the bar and ate and talked about nothing important — his brothers, my uncle, the particular personality of small Montana towns — and it was easy in a way I hadn’t expected from a man who communicated mostly in silences.
He’d checked off most of the repair list, except for the loose floorboards upstairs and downstairs. That would take supplies he didn’t have with him. He fixed the loose shelf bracket behindthe bar, which put him on my side of the counter. Close enough that I had to turn sideways to get past him when I needed something.
I needed a lot of things, apparently, and we were both absolutely aware of that fact.
“Excuse me,” I said the first time, squeezing past with a bottle of whiskey that absolutely needed to be moved right then. I made sure I had my ass to his front.
He shifted. But not much.
I allowed myself a small smile.
“Excuse me,” I repeated a second time, this time reaching for a bottle of tequila that had been in the wrong spot all week. I stood on my tiptoes and stretched. The move pushed my hip out.
That move earned me a grunt.
The third time I didn’t even have a reason. I just needed to get to the other end of the bar and he was in the way. I turned, scooted beneath his arms, my breasts brushing against his chest and neither of us pretended that was an accident.
He dropped his arms, one hand going to my hip, holding me there.
